The End of History

Gods and Body Parts

The end of history could occur in our lifetimes.

History --
the story of human civilization, archives for that,
language, keys to the meaning of symbols, layers of wisdom,
human beings curious enough to look, read, understand,
a thread of life that transcends the single breath --
this couldl end.

Inconceivable?

Endings are a mess --
demarcations trail to infinity and so on, nevertheless--

History could end in our lifetimes and those who say
"Live each day as if it were your last,"
have read time more deeply than they knew to know.

Evidence cascades --
climate change, rampant injustice, crumbling infrastructures,
nuclear weapons pointed akimbo, economic systems creating waste
and shortages to inflate corporate empires.

Gods and body parts meld to gristle, bone, blood,
and a wrong story.

Weapons of annihilation are controlled by self righteous thugs.

Israeli bombs blast the mutilated body of Gaza woman
into a neighbor's house.

7 train blasts in Mumbai tilt India and Pakistan
face-to-nuclear-face.

Israeli bombs hit ten miles from Beirut , destroy roads, bridges,
and the airport.

Syria orchestrates attacks on Israel to aid Gaza. Yemen
calls for an Arab summit.

North Korea sets up missile tests again. Japan considers
a pre-emptive strike, one wonders how.

Iran is itching to kick nuclear ass, Shia multitudes
errupt.

The Taliban controls Somalia, most of Afghanistan
and too much of Pakistan.

The end of history.

Gods and body parts, reality and home exploding
in relentless, horrific blasts that reverberate until
there is no past, no one left to tell the story,
none to hear it.

The inconceivable stuns the imagination --

though weaving counterpoint to it, is something like
what Abraham Lincoln said in his First Inagural Address,
March 4th, 1861.

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing
government, they can exercise their constitutional right
of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember
or overthrow it."

And something Howard Zinn said about the answer
to the catastrophe this president has orchestrated
for the world being --

us.

Your thoughts?

©Susan Bright



Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

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